Like "The Signal-Man" just preceding it, the satirical sketch
re-titled "The Boy at Mugby" in the 1867 Diamond Edition volume, is not presented its
original context as part of the framed-tale sequence entitled
Mugby Junction, but as a detached, first-person narrative, with an impish
refreshment-room boy serving as the street-wise commentator.

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Passage Illustrated

I am the boy at Mugby. That's about what I am.

You don't know what I mean? What a pity! But I think you do. I think you
must. Look here. I am the boy at what is called The Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction,
and what's proudest boast is, that it never yet refreshed a mortal being.

Up in a corner of the Down Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction, in the
height of twenty-seven cross draughts (I've often counted 'em while they brush the
First-Class hair twenty-seven ways), behind the bottles, among the glasses, bounded on
the nor'west by the beer, stood pretty far to the right of a metallic object that's at
times the tea-urn and at times the soup-tureen, according to the nature of the last twang
imparted to its contents which are the same groundwork, fended off from the traveller by
a barrier of stale sponge-cakes erected atop of the counter, and lastly exposed sideways
to the glare of Our Missis's eye — you ask a Boy so sitiwated, next time you stop
in a hurry at Mugby, for anything to drink; you take particular notice that he'll try to
seem not to hear you, that he'll appear in a absent manner to survey the Line through a
transparent medium composed of your head and body, and that he won't serve you as long as
you can possibly bear it. That's me.

What a lark it is! We are the Model Establishment, we are, at Mugby. Other
Refreshment Rooms send their imperfect young ladies up to be finished off by our Missis.
For some of the young ladies, when they're new to the business, come into it mild! Ah!
Our Missis, she soon takes that out of 'em. Why, I originally come into the business meek
myself. But Our Missis, she soon took that out of me.

What a delightful lark it is! I look upon us Refreshmenters as ockipying
the only proudly independent footing on the Line. There's Papers, for instance, —
my honourable friend, if he will allow me to call him so, — him as belongs to
Smith's bookstall. Why, he no more dares to be up to our Refreshmenting games than he
dares to jump a top of a locomotive with her steam at full pressure, and cut away upon
her alone, driving himself, at limited-mail speed. Papers, he'd get his head punched at
every compartment, first, second, and third, the whole length of a train, if he was to
ventur to imitate my demeanour. It's the same with the porters, the same with the guards,
the same with the ticket clerks, the same the whole way up to the secretary,
traffic-manager, or very chairman. There ain't a one among 'em on the nobly independent
footing we are. Did you ever catch one of them, when you wanted anything of him, making a
system of surveying the Line through a transparent medium composed of your head and body?
I should hope not. [p. 303]

Commentary

The Boy at Mugby thoroughly enjoys preying upon society, and he revels in
his chosen occupation as 'a most highly delicious lark'. He depicts his exploits with
such gusto, nevertheless, that it is impossible to deny him the kind of sympathy which
Dickens himself must have felt when he signed a letter to his friend Thomas Beard 'The
Boy (at Mugby)'. [Thomas, "Introduction to Charles Dickens: Selected
Short Fiction, 25]

Sol Eytinge's relatively simple illustration nevertheless underscores the
Boy's gleefully bragging about poor service and the unpalatable food and beverages
inflicted upon the travelling public in Great Britain. In her introduction to the Penguin
Classics collection of Dickens's short fiction, Deborah A. Thomas indicts the behaviour
and attitude of the "irrepressible" food services functionary as tantamount to "juvenile
delinquency" (25), but in his glee at cheating and insulting the travelling public he is
merely reflecting the thinking and behaviour of his adult co-workers and superiors, so
that readers still relish the cheeky Boy's derisive comments in spite of themselves. The
figure of the Boy, a wizened adult picking up empty bottles, is not nearly so engaging in
Mahoney's 1868 Illustrated Library edition illustration featuring the Gorgon of The
Refreshment Room confronting an obstreperous American traveller about "self-service" in
Mugby Junction.

In All the Year
Round, 16 (7 December 1866), Mugby Junction included
the following pieces: "Barbox Brothers" and "Barbox Brothers and Co." by Charles Dickens;
"Main line. The Boy at Mugby" and "No. 1 branch line. The Signal-man" by Charles Dickens;
"No. 2 Branch Line. The Engine-driver" by Andrew Halliday; "No. 3 Branch Line. The
Compensation House" by Charles Allston Collins; "No. 4 Branch Line. The Travelling Post
Office" by Hesba Stretton, and "No. 5 Branch Line. The Engineer" by Amelia B. Edwards.
Here, then, late in the series of Christmas stories Dickens
deviates from his established pattern in that he has not merely provided a framework that
he and others fill, for he has written fully half of the Extra Christmas Number, and yet
as the "Conductor" has offered no an anti-masque.

The Harry French illustrations for Mugby Junction in The
Charles Dickens Library Edition, do not deal with either "The Boy at Mugby" or
"The Signal-Man." Rather, The
Face at the Window and Polly, Barbox Brothers' Guest at Dinner focus on the
wanderings through Mugby of the Man from Nowhere in the first two stories. However, in
the former illustration Furniss does capture something of the uncanny feeling that
permeates the psychological ghost story, while in the latter he conveys the child's
perspective on adult affairs that one finds in "The Boy at Mugby." Closest in spirit,
then, to the playful humour of Eytinge is E. A. Abbey's I noticed that Sniff was agin a-rubbing his stomach with a soothing
hand, and that he had drored up one leg, in which composition, however, Smiff
and the Missis (the director of the food services operation) dominate, and the smirking
Boy is relegated to the left-hand register at the back of the refreshment room. The
theme of both American illustrations sounds a cautionary note to American tourists in
Britain, where refreshment rooms (unlike those in France) will "Keep the public down."
In contrast, Edward Dalziel's Household Edition illustration focuses on the relationship
between Dickens's faneur, The Man from Nowhere, and the psychologically damaged
Signal-man who is an extension of the vast railway machine.

Later Editions. Left: E. A. Abbey's "She prayed a
good good prayer and I joined in it poor me." (1876). Right: E. G. Dalziel's
"I took you for some one else yesterday evening. That troubles
me" (1877). [Click on images to enlarge them.]